I don't like vendor prefixes. But I also do not like the idea of vendor proposals getting into the wild in a chaotic fashion.

"This rant" actually addresses this issue by suggesting not to add vendor prefixes and instead putting the proposals into dev-builds unprefixed, and they stay in the dev build until that day that the proposal is ratified and they may be released into the release builds.

I can see how this idea would be an issue for an individual vendor (like Apple) who volunteered the majority of the cited extensions. Apple of course wanted these extension to be available as soon as possible to every webkit user (especially their mobile users). The idea of having to wait for the standards body to ratify the extensions before being able to offer them outside of a dev build would sure seem appalling from this perspective. It would also pose the essential question, how Apple would even offer a "dev build" of mobile-webkit for people to try (an unsolved problem far as I know, unless of course one would require every interested web developer to register as iOS developer, which would rather limit the audience willing to even try their extensions).

But this is the core of the issue, vendors do not want to wait for the standards body, and they want to leverage the advantage they can build themselves right now into their products. And this is exactly what makes web-developers life difficult when being in a clinch between getting a project done right now and working across the major browsers.

So maybe instead of doing more of the same (if you're in a hole, protip, stop digging) the solution would be to streamline the standardization process to work faster, and show a little more patience with extensions until they're ratified before releasing them in a release-build (in any shape or form).